Gadzooks, it’s been over a year since I first ranted about Minecraft, the epic blocky building game by Markus “Notch” Persson. Clearly it’s well overdue a revisit from us. And there’s much to catch up on, too – including a Portal mod – so join me below decks, and we’ll explore the niche this game is carving out for itself.
Minecraft is a building game based around worlds filled with millions of blocks. In the basic mode of the game you are a free-roaming chappie who can build or destroy blocks at will. As an objective-free sandbox building game it’s pretty impressive: you can choose from a large range of blocks, each with their own properties, and place them together to create extraordinarily complex constructs: spacecraft, floating islands, volcanoes, vast inverted skulls, barely coherent pink squiggles and green splats that rise up from the ocean like Cthulhu’s breakfast. Anything is possible, as long as it’s anything made of blocks. What’s more is that it’s possible in multiplayer, in your browser. Seriously, go take a look. Seeing people build, or even the vast, chaotic remnants of their building and counter-building, is a wondrous thing. The activity of pixel-architects, building for the love of it. If you’ve not already have nose at this particular phenomenon then you are missing out, if just because of the extraordinary 3D doodles that people make in the public game spaces. And if you have seen it, you should probably have a refresher, a Minecraft safari. Anyway, that jotter pad of block magic was pretty much just the first step, and since then game has been ballooning with new ideas, new features, and an entirely more feature-heavy “survival” mode.

The survival mode, which can be played offline, is about this: surviving. The world is hostile, and you need to make use of the resources it supplies to stay alive. I didn’t stay alive particularly long on my first adventure, dying in the first night, but my second was rather more fruitful, thanks to watching these video tutorials. The main thing to realise is that everything you need to survive is available in the world, but you will need to build and craft to get at it. Survival adds an inventory system and allows you to use the raw blocks you gather to create tools, which will enable you to gather other, previously inaccessible types of blocks. As you do this, you start to cement your stake on the world, and work toward your survival. It’s a gentle kind of escalation, and in terms of visuals and interface it’s rather… clunky.

But that’s okay, because it’s brimming with charm. From the occasional music to the sudden moments of vertiginous horror as you flee from death in the dark, it’s filled with splendid activity. Survival is governed by its day-night cycle. When it gets dark, it gets dangerous. Unlike the original sandbox, it’s not the griefing of other players you need to worry about, but the things which spawn in the world. You can kill these enemies, but only once you’ve made some weapons and armour. This means that the first few days of your game are spent gathering resources, while the nights are spent hiding in a cave, lit by torches you made during the day, crafting whatever else is in your inventory. Literally hiding in a niche. There’s some kind of metaphor about PC gaming here, isn’t there?

So yes, it’s worth doing a bit of running about outside at night, because otherwise you get bored, but also because it’s good to scare yourself. There will be a bunch of different monsters out there, and you might be able to kill them if you’re suitably equipped. You will only be equipped if, as I mentioned, you have explored, gathered, and crafted things at length before your encounter. What is most beautiful about Minecraft’s survival mode is this ability to explore a huge, cubic world. You’ll be hungry for resources – including the actual hunger for meat to heal your injuries – and you’ll find yourself roaming far and wide for deposits of interesting materials so that you can make more suitable equipment. A little experimentation comes in, too. Can I make armour out of what appears to be a cactus? The crafting system is a little opaque at the moment, but there’s a decent guide to the possible formula of items here, should you need some pointers. As things gel you upgrade your tools to upgrade your weapons, and then begin to do more than brick yourself up in a hole: you’ll survive battles with the most heinous of monsters which inhabit your randomly generated home. It’s a kind of generative 8-bit Lego Stalker, and that means I love it.

If you want more help getting started with the survival mode you could do worse than heading over here for the comprehensive help that the community has generated and compiled. It’s an extremely busy and helpful community, with a lot more inventiveness than I can easily chart in this brief post.

And there’s yet more in the future, too. The game is in an alpha state right now, with a low price for pre-ordering access to the full thing. Beta is on the horizon, which will bring optimisations and new features. There are already a bunch of maps, textures and other add-ons being imagined and developed by various clever community folks, and Notch himself is busily working on both a more advanced build of the core game, and on an “adventure mode” in which you will be doing less building and excavating, and more exploring a dungeon or landscape that has previously been constructed for you. Survival mode is entertaining for a few hours just as it is now, and I am keen to see what Notch and his army of builders will come up with soon. Speaking of which…

Here’s that Portal mod for Minecraft:

So I suppose the question is: should we have an RPS Minecraft server? We probably should. Time to make some investigations.

God, I really had to resist posting a link to the Chockablock theme tune somewhere in this post. Gillen would have killed me.

Remember Wurm? Comparing it to Minecraft is actually an interesting exercise. Especially the thing about spiders at night ambushing people. I was expecting bearsharks and fog to appear in Minecraft too.

When the multiplayer code has matured, I’d definitely play on an rps server. Multiplayer survival in a infinite map thingy would be awesome.

Survival mode sounds really good! I was under the impression it was a sort of dungeon crawlery experience but that’s not the case at all. How difficult is it to get underway? Not Dwarf Fortress difficult I hope.

It *can* be dungeon crawl like if that’s what you want to do. However, at some point you’re going to have to put some time into resource gathering to support your dungeon crawling :)

It also depends on the world you’ve generated, although they all seem to contain vast caverns that you’ll find … when you least expect it. I have a sky bridge, an underwater lair, a tower, and I still have an accidentally discovered cave network that I have feared to explore fully.

The thing that does it for me is exploring. The game itself is currently rather light on actual objectives or gameplay. Survival mode is exactly that. Build a house gather resources and create your personal empire out of the things you find.

But really the world generator spits out very beautiful maps and playing this feels like the first days in a new mmo where everything is fresh and new. You never know what is behind the next hill or down in the cave. And as you boldly go where no man has gone before you can make the world your own, exploring further and further, building outposts and giant lighthouses so you can find your way back.

Really if you are into exploring this is worth the 10€ many times over.

I bumped in to this on YouTube and was somewhat confused. Gave me a Dwarf Fortress vibe, I expect because of the graphics. Could be fun to tinker with, although I don’t really follow the point of adventure mode…can’t I just play Oblivion? ;)

What people may not realise is the extent of the generated world. I’ve seen forested valleys, towering rock cliffs with cascading waterfalls, sandy beaches, archipelagos. And then underground there are caverns — claustrophobic ones, large ones, dangerous vertical shaft ones, not to mention streams of water and lava. And all this goes on and on and on and on.

Survival is great fun, and will be more-so when it becomes properly multiplayer. It just needs a kick so there’s challenge after you’ve set up and built a basic headquarters. Personally, I think some sort of mission(s) to encourage long-distance wandering would be the best bet. I’m sure such a thing is on the cards.

“What people may not realise is the extent of the generated world. I’ve seen forested valleys, towering rock cliffs with cascading waterfalls, sandy beaches, archipelagos. And then underground there are caverns — claustrophobic ones, large ones, dangerous vertical shaft ones, not to mention streams of water and lava. And all this goes on and on and on and on.”

In case your enthusiastic words weren’t enough to convince the skeptics out there:

Indeed. I’ve been playing it since March. Definitely more than 200 hours by now.

An RPS server would be excellent once most of the major server bugs are fixed. The problem with the minecraft community is that there are a lot of very stupid people who think it’s fun to destroy everything others have created. (link to minecraftwiki.net)

I’d love to play on a server with its own excellent community, and RPS definitely has that.

I am talking about indie games doing well and also sneering at the indie games which ask for $20 until long after all hype is gone and then end up for sale for $5 or crammed into a bundle where they will be lucky if they see a whole dollar per sale. Or worse languish at $20 and only get any market penetration among pirates who will never pay.

@Helio – Assumed it was a dig at cliffski and the like. But yeah, Notch must be rolling in it by now – it’s 10 euro’s too, which if I’m not wrong is about twelve dollars.
That said, MInecraft isn’t just any old game, and it thrives on a dedicated community, which is is a good substitute for any sort of advertising. Not all indie games can claim to have the same.

Yeah, it’ll be interesting to see what happens when he increases the price and what happens with sales then. Of course there will be loads of other variables to consider, but it’ll still be interesting.

Was just thinking and the same thing – I bought the game on Saturday and have barely slept since.
My waking hours are spent constructing vast minecart rail systems and water streams to better serve my already sprawling mine.

I can’t remember ever being so utterly enthralled by a game. And guess what people, I’m playing on peaceful! I’ve yet to dare to encounter the monsters until I’ve built up my base some.

I don’t know if there is a suggestion thread for stuff to be covered by the hivemind. So I would like to politely demand from you, while threatening you with bodily harm, coverage of what Arcen Games is doing with AI War now.

They just started a beta of their new expansion Children of Neinzul, which you can now preorder(and play) for 4$ and all revenues will go to the Child’s Play charity.link to arcengames.com

Saw it linked on the TF2 blog a few days ago. Got me interested but putting down $20 for an alpha version? I’ll just wait for the full release and the inevitable bargain price (or pay what you want these days).

My immediate reaction to this was, “But, hey, Notch is such a totally cool guy. You should support these small independent developers with a few extra bucks, Mr. Cheapo. If a developer can’t make a few bucks on such a cool project, then PC gaming really is headed in a bad direction.” But then I remembered how many units Notch has sold, so, yeah, screw that rich bastard!

Heh, you should watch a video interview of Notch. You won’t be able to resist his puppy-dog like charms, and will have to buy the game then.

Once survival multiplayer is solid and up to speed with singleplayer, it’ll go into Beta phase, and the price will go up to 15 euros. This will likely happen in the next couple of months, so buy now if you want it cheap.

Several months after that, once Notch is finally satisfied with the featureset enough to call it V1.0, it’ll go up to 20 euros and stay there. By that point there should be a lot more enemy types, resource types, tools and things to do in general, so should easily be worth the money.

If Notch decided to ditch programming tomorrow and never write another line of code, the game would still easily be worth twice as much as he’s charging. You get this almost infinite sandbox for exploring, exploiting, and building increasingly absurd things, from simple things like a skyscraper which goes above the clouds to building complex logic circuits. A First Person Lego Set.

But since he is still developing, one of the fun things is the constant updates. Almost every week there’s the “Secret Friday Update”, where Notch throws in new features without actually telling anyone what they are. It’s rather fun trying to figure out what’s new and what can be done with the new items like the strange new plants now found around the coast.

So this would be a completely worthwhile purchase. Don’t let the word ‘alpha’ scare you off.

It’s well worth the money. Don’t let the “alpha” fool you. Notch is that Dwarf Fortress/Mount&Blade-style indie development model where the game gets stable alpha/beta releases for years before it hits a nominal 1.0. It’s alpha because there are many more features planned, not because it’s buggy or missing anything crucial.

I think in the case of Minecraft, you might be in for a very long (infinite?) wait for a ‘bargain price’. The Minecraft sale is happening right now, with the Alpha. The game’s already insane popularity suggests there won’t be need for a sale for a very long time, if ever.

I find it strange that there’s barely any mention that, in later versions of Minecraft Survival, it will generate an entire UNDERWORLD for you to explore. One time I spent four hours and over 200 torches on an enormous spelunking adventure in a single cave-network that I found the entrance to right on the surface. It took me the better part of half an hour just to find my way back to the surface – not because I ran out of caves to explore, but because I ran out of wood to make into torches.

Oh god, so many monters down there. So much treasure. So much iron and redstone. So many subterranean waterfalls and lava lakes!

The latest few versions have let the world generator go even crazier – some impossible fantasy cliff formations to be found, and even some outright aerial floating islands to try and clamber your way up onto somehow. Notch has even mentioned that he wants to make floating islands part of the core gameplay, as they’ll held up by veins of magical gravity-defying ore. If you mine all of it out? Well, gravity suddenly kicks in.

Unless Notch somehow gets bored (unlikely, unless he gets bored of being VERY RICH) of Minecraft, it will continue to be fantastic well into the future.

I’m always surprised at how exploring the caves just never gets old. I never seem to understand the importance of changes when I hear them. Oh, he can now spawn water and lava in the caves, meh. And then in the game I bust through a wall to discover a huge cave with water and lava falling next each other with an obsidian floor. Wow! Oh, and diamonds! Finding your way back to the surface is always fun too.

I really like how sand temporarily defies gravity in the caves right now. I have a cave on one of my maps with a mostly sand ceiling. Above that ceiling is an ocean. After I finish mining it I can’t wait to give that sand a little nudge to create a huge cave-in + flood. I really like the idea of having to avoid cave-ins.

I’m having a hard time deciding whether to play Starcraft 2 or Minecraft, it’s that good. In fact, when I first launched the game, turned around on the hillside where I spawned and saw this stunningly blocky vista spread out before me with cows, ducks and pigs wandering around in, this feeling of elation at buying a completely awesome game hit me – something I haven’t experienced for decades. It’s like I was 15 again. I’ve spent days so far just exploring caverns, it’s stunning.

SpecialAttack.net Survival server (with gameplay-enhancing mods): 85.17.102.2SpecialAttack.net Freebuild server (one of the most popular ones out there!): link to minecraft.net

Currently Survival Multiplayer is very buggy and leaky. We had our server bug out due to running out of RAM even though the VMWare host had 7GB assigned to it – I mean due to a combination of various Minecraft servers together and a large influx of players at once.

I’ve been desperately trying to purchase this game inasmuch as it seems to hinge on a gameplay format on which I thrive, but Notch insists on being paid via PayPal and PayPal insists on summarily kicking me in the ‘nads. I am at an impasse.

RPS survival server would be ace, but only with careful admins and trusted players. I have no interest in playing on a public servers filled with griefers, or griefer supporters who insist ‘griefeing is part of the survival game, as you have to deal with intelligent humans’. No, thats bollocks.

I never really clicked with Minecraft, it felt like Dwarf Fortress but with more manual labour and less kitten burning. Call me crazy but I think DF’s graphics and scope for monstrous creations are better too.

Actually, can you get flowing water, waterwheels, cogs etc. in Minecraft..? I may be tempted to give it another go.

There is still a lack of mechanical and/or interactive parts in Minecraft, but it’s still heavily in development and there should eventually be such stuff in the game. At least I hope so, because some of the water physics cry out to be used for huge machines.

On the actual game: I soooo love it. It’s easily the best purchase this year for me. Dwarf Fortress never really clicked for me, because of the… erm, functional graphical representation of stuff you build. In Minecraft I occasionally just stay still, look at what I built and think “Wow… this looks gorgeous.” That’s where I get my motivation from.

Notch is definitely moving in the direction of more traps and machinations. You can now create redstone circuits to open doors and such. There are pressure plates, levers, and switches. There are tracks and powered minecarts. So far you can’t do anything really spectacular with these, but it is clear that in the future you will be able to.

Right now you can definitely create a simple “mob steps on pressure plate -> drop TNT on him”. The problem is that TNT is currently only available as a drop from the creepers. I’m pretty sure someone created a simple computer using water and sand doors. I think the redstone circuits can do that as well.

However, I don’t think minecraft will ever really be a 3d first person dwarf fortress.

Went and bought it after reading this, this morning and spent a few hours building myself a little house in a cliff with a vast mining network underneath it. But couldn’t for the life of me find any iron anywhere, which kinda kicked me in the teeth. The only thing it could really use is some form of map. Way too easy to lose your ‘home’ while you’re off exploring.

Draw your own map, and place markers/landmarks to help you find your way. I make a point of building a well lit, extra-tall tower at the center of my established territory so that even at night, I should be able to find my way back to it.

I feel a bit daft that that didn’t occur to me. Had light shining through my windows and around my walls, but being surrounded by mountains it was easy to overlook. Fingers crossed that should make my life easier.

Sigh. You guys just had to rub it in, eh…
I went and bought it yesterday on a whim, then realized that paypal is currently forcing me to pay everything in echeques, which means I need to wait an unspecified number of days to play :(

Though, I suppose it’s kind of like maybe ordering a game, and waiting for it to arrive. I’m so unused to waiting!

Minecraft is the greatest thing I’ve played all year. Its been really fun watch it evolve over the last 5 months. So thanks RPS for putting it into my field of vision and thanks to Notch for being extra awesome.

great article. I have preordered the game just few day ago, 9,95 euros. Now I’m waiting to play the beta version at least, and great interest for “adventure play”. Great idea anyway, I am happy that community have respond(50.000 and more prepurchaser, it’s a record I presume)

I caved, bought it, barely starting out but really liking where this is going. Dungeon craft-crawling online is the sort of gameplay I’ve been looking for…

However! I’d recommend everyone who likes to play multiplayer pick up this unofficial persister app which you run instead of the main Minecraft EXE, so you can save your inventory. I hope this gets added in a more permanent way in future, but for now, this works!

I bought it a few weeks ago, largely on the strength of recommendations here on RPS, and have been greatly enjoying the single player. I’m sure it will be fun in co-op on a closed server, as well, once the option stabilizes.

Though the game is very simple – basically just a tile-based game in 3D where the players are allowed to freely manipulate the tiles – it is quite remarkable just how real the world feels. Perhaps it’s due to the simplicity alone that the game is capable of showing some of the staggeringly detailed breathtaking sights it has.

And this is just from watching some gameplay videos of it. I really aught to give it a spin some day.

I have to add my voice to the many that picked this up recently and is really enjoying it. I’m looking forward to the day/night cycles and mobs in multiplayer. That is when the true fun shall commence…..

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